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CHAPTER I—THE FLOWING ROAD

“It’s good to be back again, Morse, back to civilization, and it’s mighty good of you to take me in this way.”

Stanley Morse looked at the orchid hunter as the latter leaned forward from the cozy depth of the saddlebag chair and stretched his lean hands to the blaze. The fingers were more like claws than human attributes; the whole man seemed little more than a well-preserved mummy, a strangely different person from the vigorous naturalist Morse remembered meeting three years before on the higher reaches of the Amazon—the “Flowing Road.” The man’s clothes hung in ludicrous folds about his gaunt frame, and he shivered despite the heat of the blazing logs that almost scorched his chair.

“Nonsense, Murdock!” he said. “I’m only trying to repay your own hospitality. Do you suppose I have forgotten the time you took me into camp on the Huallagos River, when my raft had gone to pieces in the Chapaja Rapids with all my equipment? You’ve got the malaria in your system yet. Let me get you something to offset that ague.”

“It’s more than malaria, Morse. There’s nothing in your medicine chest, or anyone else’s, that can help me,

He laughed a little hysterically and stripped back the sleeve from one arm. The limb, save for its power of movement, seemed atrophied, flesh and muscle and skin had shrunk about the bones until they looked like two sticks held together with twisted cords.

“That’s emblematic of the rest of me,” he said, as the loose cloth slid back over his knobby wrist. “I’ve done my last league on the Flowing Road or any other road, for that matter. I’ve found my last orchid.”

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